Today at my school we celebrated the start of Picture Book Month. You might be asking "What is Picture Book Month?" Well I grabbed this explanation off of Katie Davis' website:

"It is an international initiative to designate November as Picture Book Month, encouraging grown-ups to read picture books with children. Founder Dianne de Las Casas, and Co-Founders, Wendy Martin, Elizabeth O. Dulemba (author/illustrator), Tara Lazar (author) and I (Katie Davis) are putting it all together."

You might be wondering how we celebrated Picture Book Month. For Day 1, one of the first grade classes at my school skyped with Mr. Schu's (@mrschureads on twitter) second grade class from Brook Forest Elementary in Illinois. Mr. Schu's class did a great job telling us about Picture Book Month and then I had a chance to share about 3 special picture books with them.

However, it didn't end there. In second and third grade today, we welcomed debut picture book creators Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp to San Rafael. Their book Marcel The Shell With Shoes On released today. It was so much fun to get to celebrate with these two wonderful writers and illustrators and help them kick off their book tour.

Above Dean and Jenny tell a little bit about their new book.

Answering questions from students.

Dean operates the technology while Jenny reads the story in Marcel's voice.

If you haven't seen the original video that sparked this book, take a minute to check it out below.

We are looking forward to more Skype visits with Twitter Friends from all over the country. I am so excited to be able to connect my students with students from other places and together be able to celebrate picture books. I am also thrilled that we will be hosting visits from the following Picture Book authors and illustrators - Scott Campbell (Zombie in Love), Oliver Jeffer (Stuck), and Bill Thomson (Chalk).